Q2 2020 Threat Report

Cyber warfare is not a new concept, it’s just a new medium. It’s a kind of military operation targeting enemy infrastructure and communications, which involves cleverly thought out strategies to outwit the opponent, and firepower to improve the chances of successfully taking down the targets.

Resembling real-life military operations where a cover-up is put into place to conceal the real target, a large UDP-based attack is employed as a smokescreen to distract in-house security teams from other attacks that are taking place. The tactics behind the operation are Bit-and-Piece attacks which play a major role in contaminating IP pools across numerous IP prefixes with negligible sized junk traffic, while attacks are unleashed in the form of amplification and different types of UDP-based attacks.

In this report, we’re going to discuss how bit-and-piece cyber warfare attacks have continued to evolve, and are able to successfully evade DDoS mitigation schemes when blended with multiple attack vectors, and the challenges that these advanced attack tactics present to the cybersecurity world.

We will also explore novel deep-learning based solutions for identifying and predicting complex attack patterns.

Nexusguard recorded a 515.15% YoY and 38.76% QoQ increase in DDoS attacks in Q2 2020. This increase is a continuation of the increasing trend set in Q1 2020. Unlike in Q1 2020 in which over 85.45% of attacks were UDP attacks, 67.16% of UDP attacks this quarter were launched with bit-and-piece attacks, designed to cause maximum damage to target networks.

UDP-based attacks were designed specifically to bypass the volumetric DDoS protection mechanisms of CSPs. In some attack cases, perpetrators targeted 256 IP addresses in the same /24 prefix, non-stop for an entire month. Bit-and-piece attacks, the main impetus behind the recent spate of attacks also saw a 569.5% QoQ and 310.43% YoY increase.

Download the report to find out more.